Managing File Ownership

With rapid changes in work assignments among the work force, it is an ongoing task to insure that the files on the server are “owned” by a responsible employee or department.   The power in FileWizard makes the task quick and easy as demonstrated in this paper.

Finding File Ownership

FileWizard shows file owners by creating a query consisting of File Size and File Owner as query items.  This is shown in Figure 1. 

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Figure 1  Owners Query

 

When the query is executed, the results are shown in tabular form (Figure 2) and as a bar graph (Figure 3).  If there were too many owners to make a good graph, FileWizard defaults to a tabular report.

 

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 Figure 2 Owners Result (Tabular Report) – on NT volume

The bar graph shows the amount of used space that is attributable to each user.

 

 

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Figure 3 Owners Result (Bar Graph)

 

 Dick is no longer a member of the department.  His account was deleted.  The files the he owned are now "orphaned".  With FileWizard, we can set a new owner for the files. This is done by doing a scan, showing file names and owners.

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Figure 4 Owners showing orphan files

 

The scan results were sorted by owner and the files with no owner were highlighted, as shown in Figure 5. A new person, Alice, has been assigned to the department, and Dick's files should be assigned to her.

 

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Figure 5 Orphan files higlighted

 

Reassigning Ownership of "orphan" files

 

With the "orphan" files highlighted, from the Action menu in FileWizard, choose Set File Owner.  This will display a list of valid owners.  The highlighted files can then be set to a new owner.  In this case, it is Alice.

 

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Figure 6 Set File Owner to Alice

The ownership for these "orphan" files is now assigned to Alice, as shown in Figure 7.  FileWizard makes it easy to assign ownership of files so that you can be sure that all files of a discontinued employee are re-assigned and the server is kept clean of files that are not owned by anyone.

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Figure 7 File Ownership after reassignment

Using FileWizard on NetWare

Performing a scan and then an Owners query on Vulcan\SYS: (a NetWare 5 volume) shows the file ownership as in Figure 8.  As you can see files are owned by Tom, Dick and Harry, in addition to Vulcan and supervisor.

 

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Figure 8 File Ownership on NetWare volume

Run a scan with query items being File Name, File Size, and File Owner, then in the result screen highlight all the files that belong to Dick and Tom and change them to user Harry. Then you will note that Harry is the user that owns the files.

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Figure 9 Showing change of ownership to Harry

 

Harry was deleted as a user, since he left the company.  A new scan and a owners query show the files that were assigned to him are now showing up as invalid id.  These files are easily identified and assigned to a new owner. 

 

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Figure 10 Files owned by Invalid Id

 

Summary

This quick note shows how easy it is to manage file ownership.  You can find out who owns what space, you can find out any files that are “orphans”, (owned by Invalid Id's in NetWare, or No Owner Found in Windows), and take action to correct the situation.  As shown, this works equally well on NT and NetWare servers.